Safe
by luvmeanddespair
Summary: Halloween at the Dursleys. 'It was the same every year he’d been at the Dursley house, which was – he counted on his fingers – eight years now. He knew the schedule. Eight years was a long time.' How hard can it be ... ?


This would have been up earlier, if it weren't for some internet stupidity recently ...

This one won a contest on HPIA (you can find the link in my profile, it's a very good forum) for Halloween. Granted, it was the _only _entry, but don't let that put you off. ;)

Of course, I don't own the whole Harry Potter thing. No, really I don't.

But I hope you enjoy this. :)

* * *

'Come on, now, Dudders, we're going to be late to meet the Polkisses!' 

Harry could hear his aunt, Petunia, very clearly through the thin wooden staircase, but he tried to block out the words she spoke in that harsh, horsy voice. It was the same every year he'd been at the Dursley house, which was – he counted on his fingers – eight years now. He would be stuffed into his dusty old cupboard all afternoon whilst Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon clucked and cooed around his fat cousin Dudley, trying to squeeze him into whatever costume the shop had largest in that year. Last year had been a ladybird, much to Harry's amusement, but he wouldn't know what Dudley had been magically transformed into this year until he was grabbed from the cupboard to give bored admiration, until the Polkisses, tired of waiting, came over and rang the doorbell, and everyone left to go trick-or-treating, leaving Harry alone in his little wooden cupboard. He knew the schedule. Eight years was a long time.

It hadn't bothered him so much in the beginning. He didn't know what Halloween or trick-or-treating was, and thought it to be something for good boys – for Dudley, not him. The definition of 'good boy' confused him in this house, though. At home, with mummy and daddy, it had been when he went to sleep quickly at night, or didn't miss the potty, or pulled the funny face mummy was pulling. Here, it was whatever Dudley did – most of which were things that had made mummy and daddy cross when _he'd_ done them. Anything the fat boy did, he tried too, though, because soon he understood that the rules were different here, even if he didn't really understand what they now were. But he hated that cupboard enough to be desperate.

Spitting on the cushions was "adorable" when Dudley did it. When Harry tried, it was "straight to that cupboard with you, boy". While Dudley could make as much of a din as he wished, one yell from Harry seemed to deserve the darkness. When he learnt to talk properly (later than other boys his age due to lack of stimulation, whereas Dudley realised all he had to do was cry and point), he would repeat his name over and over at night to keep him from forgetting. 'Boy' wasn't a very desirable tag.

He couldn't remember the first years at the Dursleys' very well now, and he definitely couldn't remember much at all about life with his parents, but every now and then, when he was asleep and dreaming, there would be a sweet scent in his nose, a flowery voice in his ear, a lock of soft hair tickling his face, not burning his face as he'd expect fire of that colour to do. A pair of wiry glasses to play with. Kind eyes, brown and green, smiling down on him. He reached …

He would cry himself back to sleep, still clasping non-existent curls.

As he got older, started school, he learnt more about Halloween – about where it came from, what children did, what they received in return. Every year his classmates would chatter excitedly in the weeks coming up to Halloween about what they were doing; where they were trick-or-treating, who with, of course, what their costumes were. Harry would sit quietly in a corner alone, and his class teacher, Ms Patch, would worry about him, just as silently; she had met his aunt and uncle – their son Dudley was also in her class – and whilst they seemed to have an almost unhealthy obsession over Dudley, they threw away every comment she, or anyone else, had to say about their small strange nephew. She just secretly hoped it would all go away before anything more serious called for her involvement.

Harry didn't have Ms Patch now, and he didn't miss her.

He missed his mum and dad.

When he was five his aunt Petunia had told him, in a terse voice after a lot of timid questioning, that his mother and father had died in a car crash, on Halloween. Harry had wanted to know more, where they were going, who they were seeing, where they were when it … happened, but his aunt had simply ignored him, and continued doing the dishes until she snapped at him to get away.

For the last couple of years, after Aunt Petunia had told him this, he didn't mind missing the trick-or-treating so much. He didn't fancy dressing up in the silly costumes Dudley waddled round in – pirate, vampire, Frankenstein, _ladybird_ – or wandering round begging for sweets, anyway. He much preferred having the time on his own to think about his parents. It was just the loneliness, when he watched Dudley and Piers shooed out the front door by their parents, and return with bagfuls of sweets; the same feeling he sometimes still felt at break or dinner at school, as everyone rushed off with their friends whilst he took as much time as possible to put his stiff away, or get his meagre lunchbox, as much to avoid the fact that he had no friends as to avoid Dudley and his. It wasn't the sweets and costumes, or friends he craved for, as much as the company. The sense of belonging. Fun.

He wasn't sure, but he thought he'd had fun with mum and dad. Laughter and hugs accompanied the red hair and glasses, and if he put his mind to it, he could vaguely remember an uncle Padfoot, and another … Moony, and another one, long forgotten. No one laughed with Harry now; there was only Uncle Vernon's dark cynicism.

He wondered if Dudley and his parents laughed during their Halloween rounds, with Piers and his. He wondered if the batty old Mrs Figg would give them dusty old sweets tasting faintly like frogs' legs, now infamous amongst his classmates.

Suddenly, Harry heard the door slam, and wondered if the Polkisses had arrived already. Silence looked, though, and it dawned on him that they must have come and gone already. The Dursleys hadn't called on him to admire Dudley's costume, he realised, or maybe they had and he'd been too lost in thought to hear them. He was sure he'd pay for that later.

He allowed the darkness to consume him again. Halloween was a special time for him. When other children were making themselves fat with sugar, he stayed alone with his parents in his thoughts.

There were no pictures of them around the Dursley house on Privet Drive, and all he had were the vague memories of red hair and wiry glasses, of those very different eyes.

He would look at his reflection most mornings whilst brushing his teeth, sometimes to worry about what wild thing Aunt Petunia might try next in an attempt to tame his unruly hair, but on the morning of October 31, he always stared harder, looked longer, concentrated more. He tried to guess who might have passed down which features; did he have his mum's eyes, his dad's hair, were their faces the same, how tall had they been, how tall would he himself become? He wondered who had had his same stubborn streak, or whether his parents might have stood up to the Dursleys once in a while. He supposed that they wouldn't like the cupboard either.

If October 31 was a school day, as today had been, Harry would wander round in an aimless daze all day, wondering if this was the hour, the minute, in which his parents had died five, six, seven years ago. If it were a weekend, he would do pretty much the same, interrupted by the Dursleys rather than schoolwork.

Today, he had pondered intently on _how_ and _why_ his parents had died. He was nine now, a very responsible age, he thought, responsible enough to start thinking about the bigger, more important things. In the cold half-light of morning, while everyone was still asleep, he had looked at a wall in his cupboard, or more importantly, at a picture hanging there on mouldy Blu-tack. He had drawn it on Halloween, funnily enough, three years before; his teacher, sick of the rabble of his class, had asked them all to do a Halloween drawing of their family, which produced a lot of werewolf fathers and Frankenstein siblings. Harry had considered drawing the Halloween of – back then – five years ago, but the idea of drawing a dead mummy and daddy scared him, so instead he drew the picture he now vowed he would keep forever and ever, and look at every Halloween.

Any other time the class was asked to draw their family, Harry filled the paper with himself, concentrating on the odd scar he was half-proud and half-ashamed of, and his big green eyes. Mr Currie didn't ask for many family drawings. He'd gotten sick of having to replace green felt tips and pencils.

Sometimes, in the background, Harry would add a stick person with a long face and two blob people, one shorter than the other; and on these pictures, the normally neutral paper-Harry would have a down turned mouth, and once Mr Currie had spotted a small patch of blue on his cheek.

The only time paper-Harry had smiled was in the Halloween picture. He was smaller than usual, standing at the bottom of the portrait-ways paper, both arms facing upwards, with a big toothy grin on his face. Drawn at the ends of the two invisible lines from his arms were two fluffy clouds, one in each top corner, and on top of these were, the teacher presumed, his deceased parents. His mother, on the left, looked to be waving down at her son, her out-of-proportion arm stuck out above her head, sausage fingers splayed. Her long curly hair was scribbled with red felt tip and her eyes seemed to have been drawn in childish detail only to be poked by the podgy green felt tip, along with Harry's own eyes. However, obviously wanting to carry on the tradition, most of the empty space had been turned into grass – until the pan ran out, of course.

Harry's father was on the right-hand cloud, with the same scrawled black hair as his son and a big but closed smile. His brown eyes were smudged, probably from when Harry was drawing the shaky glasses around them, and he was wearing black clothes; black t-shirt, black trousers, black shoes. His mother, too, was wearing a black dress, whereas Harry was wearing a red shirt and blue jeans, all coloured leaving a small gap of white between the thick outlines.

What struck you most about the picture, though, was the detail _around_ Harry's parents. The feathery pencil wings, the gold glittered halos, the wobbly yellow sun tinted with the same glitter pen. It didn't really matter that none of them were wearing a costume.

Today at school, they didn't draw a Halloween picture, or write a spooky story, or play pumpkin games. They had a supply teacher, a mean woman with one eyebrow all the way from one eye to the other, going straight across her nose.

She had made them do sums all day, or tried. Everyone talked loudly about their Halloween plans, as usual, and, as usual, Harry sat and stared into space, thinking and thinking about his parents. Then the teacher got mad and threw chalk and threatened to give everyone detention, and the scared children did every single sum – all apart from "that trouble-making brat with the silly Halloween tattoo scar. He didn't do a single sum so I've given him a detention."

When Harry got back from school, he was hungry, but made sure he burnt the letter from the teacher on the hob as Aunt Petunia hurried Dudley upstairs to show him his new TV set before doing anything else. He was sure that that teacher was a Halloween witch – she smelt like one must do.

Eating the corned beef sandwich under his dusty ceiling, he thought back over what he'd decided on over the day.

It was October 31, 1981, and Lily and James Potter were on their way back from … somewhere. Maybe uncle Padfoot's. It was dark, because it was night. And it was raining, because that's what it did in October. Maybe his parents were talking, laughing … maybe Harry's dad took his eyes off the road for a second …

Their car must have been green; or maybe they hit a green car, or maybe a motorbike, because he sometimes dreamt of a big one of those and thought it might have been involved too; or they might have landed in some fields or bushes. Because Harry could remember a flash of green, and pain in his head, which must have been when he got his scar. It was a fantasy, of course, rather than a memory, apart from the green flash. His first real memories were of asking Aunt Petunia about his parents, of crying alone on his and Dudley's first day of nursery as Dudley impressed them all with his expensive (soon broken) talking watch, of his uncle's sister Marge hitting his leg so hard with her stick he could hardly walk for a week. He wished he had a proper memory of his parents, instead of just perfume and hair. Better still, he wished his parents were still alive.

He was still imagining life if the crash had never happened when the front door crashed open, then quietly closed again.

'_Boy!_' he heard Uncle Vernon shout, and wearily called back to him.

'Yes, Uncle Vernon?'

'Don't be so obstinate,' he slurred. Harry could hear Aunt Petunia hissing, and Dudley's self-affected laugh. He never hated his 'family' more than he did at Halloween, when Dudley was full of himself – and chocolates – and Aunt Petunia acted all little girlish. But Uncle Vernon was the worst.

Drunk and stumbling, he would pull Harry from the cupboard, sit him on the floor and rant for a half hour or so as Aunt Petunia made pumpkin-shaped pancakes. He complained about anything and everything – the weather, what was on the news, next-door-but-one's yappy little dog – but mostly liked to insult Harry and his parents. He told him what a waste of space he was, how pathetic his parents had been. That they had deserved to die, and Harry was going to g the same way, having achieved nothing in his life. Aunt Petunia and her sister were fervently compared, along with James Potter and Vernon himself, and Harry and Dudley's futures. How, while Harry would die worthless and alone, Dudley would probably rise to be President (Harry was fairly certain he meant Prime Minister here, but didn't see the point in correcting him) He generally rounded off with a declaration of how good Mrs Figg's port was, then waddled into the kitchen following his wife's call of pancakes as Harry scuttled into his cupboard. After a while, his aunt would bring him the cold scraps from the pancake cutter, and then Harry would go to bed.

After Uncle Vernon's first outburst four years before, Harry cried himself to sleep for the next couple of days, concerned nursery letters disregarded and dropped in the bin. He soon picked up again, but for a while his faith in himself and his parents was shaken. What Vernon said had to be true, didn't it?

As he got older, he realised just what an idiot his uncle was when he got drunk – for he also realised that this was what his uncle became – and paid very little attention to what he shouted about. At odd times, he couldn't shake off a small fear that his parents really had been a pair of good-for-nothing layabouts, and he would end up the same, but gentle hands visited him in the night, calmed and soothed him, relinquished him from the grip of his fears.

That night, he dreamt of pointy-hat witches cackling on spindly broomsticks, of werewolves dancing around each other under a creamy full moon, of pale sheet-like ghosts swooping around in the black dead of night.

He liked his dream.

He felt safe there.

* * *

I kept getting all worried that the Dursleys seemed too harsh and abusive in this ... I hope they don't come across as _too_ inhuman. 

Reviews are love!


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